The perfect beauty

Many people are convinced that this obsession is linked to the ephemeral ideals of our time. But however, man has been always looking for it. Modigliani has captured it in the aristocratic elegance of his long necks. Botero has evoked it in the enhancement of forms and volumes. Gauguin has boosted it in the exotic colours of Polynesia. Everyone has told it in the most different ways and tastes, just because in the platonic process of becoming, the beauty is constantly changing, and its myth is therefore unreachable. On the contrary, it becomes the antithesis of itself. During the past, a diaphanous complexion could make a distinction between the noble people and those which worked in the land, and were thus exposed to the sunlight. That is why Cleopatra loved to have a bath with goat milk, and the French noble people used to powder their face, and enhanced the contrast with a well-designed beauty spot. As a perfect contrast, a tanned skin today is symbol of a physical and economic wellness, at the expense of those which have to replace exotic destinations with artificial neon suntans. Therefore: the more far away the beauty is from the means of normal people, the more it will be idealized. During the Thirties, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich burst on the scene, by proposing a cheeky beauty: their beauty was free from the constriction of corsets and petticoats, and was enhanced by pants and loose-fitting lines.

During the second post-war period, Marilyn Monroe harmonizes the balance between innocence and seduction: the blonde hair and the delicate features are echoed by full lips and dangerous curves. In a Western world that was still licking the wounds of war, the economic meagreness was counterbalanced by the generous and impeccable beauty of the Pin-up girls; it is no accident that when the wellness becomes phenomenon of a mass that has both abundant money and abundant bodies, the thin Twiggy, thanks to the mini-skirt by Mary Quant, becomes the icon of a city like London, that was constantly in a state of ferment, and was far away from the extended lethargy of the bourgeois salons. Thanks to Jane Fonda, beauty is reinvented in a toned and muscular body. During the excessive Eighties, the beauty becomes aristocratic thanks to the myth of Lady Diana, the people’s princess, but that at the same time was so unreachable from it. Cindy Crawford and Naomi interpret the bionic woman of the 90s, which today is overtaken by the imperfect androgyny of Kate Moss. Man, too, had trouble to find a common denominator. He searched it in the heroism of the Greek Doryphoros, in the exaltation of the macho man, that never has to ask, and that later was renegade by the object-man, celebrated by Richard Gere in American Gigolò.

He has been seduced by the mysterious and damned charm of Marlon Brando and James Dean, to later come almost into competition with the female hemisphere, in a maniacal attention for details, that finds in David Beckham a new metro-sexual effigy. Which one of them has the secret of the real beauty? The higher economic incomes, and the new inventions of science and cosmetic surgery, today allow most people to faithfully adjust to the models of a perfection that has the inconvenience of going too soon out of fashion. To be as unreachable as the myth says, the beauty needs to change, to vary, even to become the antithesis of itself. If you capture it with the scalpel, and you stick it to precise models, you make it unmoving, unable to evolve, and thus in a perfect antithesis with the Platonic myth of becoming. That is why the truth is that only the myth can be unchanging, but not the beauty itself.